There comes a time when all professors of literature think of writing a book like this. Elaine Showalter has been professing it for 40 years, and after such a long and varied career what could be more apposite or timely than to share the wisdom of such experience with her younger colleagues? The answer, I fear, is much. She should have been gently dissuaded from writing a book which ranges from the tendentious (‘methods can be overrated’) to the banal (‘the main difference between lectures and seminars was that in seminars the tutor sat down.’). One says ‘writing’, but the word is misapplied; ‘compiling’ would be a better term to register the very many practices which are commented upon, both by the teachers and the taught, throughout this book. There are about three citations per page, thrown in without discernible order, to give the book the appearance of variety; but pretty soon that appearance breaks down into a welter of frantic asides (‘it does not have to be original to be good’) or fussy advice (‘wear a different suit every day of the week’).
It hardly seems to matter that some of these references are meant ironically; for example the last, given to Norman Maclean when ‘he couldn’t afford that many suits’ so wore ‘a different necktie every day instead’. This scattergun technique has the effect of weakening any serious or settled argument about the nature of teaching English. There is a tendency to go uncomplainingly along with Isobel Armstrong when she states that ‘students don’t have the time to go deeply into any one author’ and to sympathise with Peter V. Conroy on his ‘struggle’ though the ‘discouraging’ early weeks of term when his students, informed that they ‘must read’ Pamela, suggested to him that it ‘somehow be made shorter’.
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